It has been an honor to perform this play in all its stages. We first gave birth to it in 2013 when the British Company, What Larks: the Only Speaking Company in Provence, invited us for a run in the South of France. We performed in Bonnieux, Carpintras, and Avignon, on the Mediterranean coast that Picasso so much adored.
Pablo Picasso was played by my adored colleague, Vincent Lappas, a magnificent Greek-American actor, with whom I also did the first Los Angeles run in 2014. That Spring, we began the journey to get it produced in Paris, France – where the events of the play take place. With the help of our patrons and donors we got it produced in French and English at the Theatre de Nesle on the Left Bank of Paris in the Fall of 2015. What an electrifying experience that was! The theatre was literally around the corner from Picasso’s atelier where he painted the renowned masterpiece, Guernica. One critic said the performance was eerie – as if Picasso still haunted the neighborhood…
Enter the “new” Pablo Picasso played by the so very talented French actor, Charles Fathy, who joined me on this journey. French journal, La Parizienne, called us “a pair of possessed actors pitted against each other as enemies, even though we are not and forced to dance an infernal waltz on a crazy merry go round from which we cannot descend”!
We jokingly now call it the show that never dies. In 2017, in association with the Alliance Francaise – Los Angeles – we performed it, yet again in both French and English, for a second LA run.
Now, in the face of all that the world has been through, we prepare for a 2021 performance in what theatre has become: a series of live-streamed shows and taking inspiration from what the great Matthew Warchus has done at the Old Vic Theatre in London. The seven time Tony Award nominee (won once, for God of Carnage) has tried to offset the limited visual possibilities of live streaming by using multiple cameras and Zoom windows to further the storytelling in his 2020 releases.
And so we hope to do the same with a new and re-invented production of A Picasso.
